No common language yet

The Incarnation unites us all round the crib at Bethlehem. But what kind of unity is there among Christians today? Here, the Archbishop of Canterbury looks ahead to January’s centenary Week of Christian Unity. It raises uncomfortable questions, he says, not least about communion...

Lowest-paid give most to charity, Tablet survey finds

PEOPLE ON the lowest incomes will be among those donating most generously to the Church and to charities this Christmas....

God-given Brilliance

Glorious yet tender, maternal yet queenly. The exquisite work on our cover is one that reflects the relationship between mother and child lying at the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation...

A crib for our time

This Christmas sees the restoration of the crib created in 1962 for the new Coventry Cathedral by the sculptor Alma Ramsey-Hosking. Here her daughter explains how it came to be restored and how it’s a fitting conclusion to her relationship with her own mother...

Here. Now. Dwelling among us

How do we ensure that the Incarnation is more than an historical event? For one of Britain’s leading Baptists, understanding what this means took him on a remarkable journey from what he calls the Protestant fringe to joining the Catholic Church...

Against the odds

Taybeh, a small village north of Jerusalem, is the last completely Christian village in Palestine. Its survival owes much to local people’s courage, help from overseas, and a certain amount of ingenuity involving the priest, an olive press and ceramic lamps...

Blood and saffron

The military junta in Burma is wreaking terrible revenge on the monks who led the campaign for democracy last autumn. It is reported that the numbers killed and arrested may run into hundreds but they kindled a revolutionary spirit that will not easily be suppressed...

Grocer to the world

Few people dominate others’ experience of Christmas as Sir Terry Leahy, the man who runs Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain. He talks to Chris Blackhurst about shopping and the festive season, his own faith – and why he thinks his stores are like the Church...

Heroin, fits and despair. Now Johnny’s back from the dead

Britain’s government spends nearly £400 million a year on the rehabilitation of drug addicts, with just a 3 per cent success rate. Cenacolo, an international community with radical treatment methods, exists on voluntary contributions and has a 90 per cent success rate. How does it do it?...

Lives well lived

The last generation of nuns to enter convents before the Second Vatican Council revolutionised religious life are now in their eighties – and older. Age has not withered them. The Tablet talked to some remarkable women, as committed as ever to lives of service and prayer...

Fresh from the word

Every day, somewhere in the world, the hymn ‘Morning has Broken’ is sung. The woman who wrote it, Eleanor Farjeon, also created carol-service evergreens ‘People, Look East’ and ‘Christmas Eve’. They all reflect a faith that she could trace back to one Midnight Mass in Italy...

‘I will give you rest’

The image that awoke Wendy Beckett’s interest in icons is a seventh-century Virgin and Child once barely discernible beneath layers of grime. Mary withdraws her gaze, urging viewers to turn to the wondrous depiction of the Christ Child...

Divine art of angling

For those who don’t fish, it is difficult to understand how large periods of inactivity on a riverbank could inspire passion, even to the point of transcendence. But it does, as many Anglican parsons – though curiously not many of their Catholic counterparts – know...

Gift-wrapped for the table

A different sort of stuffing, a kind of festive farca, is the key to a traditional north Italian winter treat...

Wanted: a Santa Claus

With just nine shopping days to go before it was all over for another year, the big store found itself without a Father Christmas. Its management were bereft. Then into their office came the answer, but would they be daring enough to take it? Andrew Nugent reveals all...

Ingenious solution

Although the ever-popular crossword actually first appeared less than a century ago, its origins can be traced back to the days of the early Christians...

Sacred exchanges

As the season of Advent ends, notes Daniel McCarthy, the Prayer over the Gifts expresses the human response to God’s gift of himself. Significantly some architecture for the altar can be seen as expressing, indeed reverberating with, the words of the prayer. Then, at the Feast of the Nativity, the Prayer over the Gifts expresses the desire that we become like Christ...

A time to receive

Most of us think of Christmas as a time of giving, but if we do not know how to accept what has been given to us with genuine gratitude our own potential for generosity is undermined...

Christmas presence

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‘The birth of Jesus Christ is a reminder to us that humanity does have a share in the divine’

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